Fruits of Smart Power: the jihad against Freedom of Speech

**Posted by Phineas

I’ll bet the Arab liberals, such as Wael Ghonim, who naively thought they could work with the Islamic supremacists are feeling like idiots right about now.

…a shadowy organization calling itself the “Jihad Group to Cleanse the Country” is threatening On TV (1), one of the nation’s leading liberal media stations, which regularly exposes the Islamist agenda. It sent a letter to the president of the station threatening to target its studios and facilities, as well as kidnap some of its top reporters and journalists, holding them for a $20 million ransom or otherwise “liquidating” them. The message further threatened other media and organizations dealing with On TV with “painful and severe punishments.”

The reason for all this? The letter accuses On TV of “seeking to destroy the nation and create chaos to implement the American and Zionist agenda”β€”or, more accurately, the media policy of the station is exercising free speech, and thus exposing the nefarious agenda of groups like this “Jihad to Cleanse the Country.”

The Obama Administration and the Clinton State Department don’t bear the blame for the rise of jihadism and Salafism in Egypt and elsewhere in the Muslim world, of course; those processes have been at work for many decades. But they are responsible for the over two years in which they formulated no policy for the transition that was obviously coming in Egypt, did nothing to smooth the way beforehand, and then reacted spasmodically when the revolt finally hit. All that Obama/Clinton “smart power” accomplished was leaving us with the distinct possibility of the Arab world’s largest nation coming under Muslim Brotherhood control, with all the inherent dangerous implications for regional stability.

It also serves to illustrate again how utterly antithetical Islam –when practiced as Muhammad intended– is to the values of Western civilization. After all, Muhammad himself had poets murdered who criticized him, while modern Europe has seen several times the assassination or attempted assassination of critics of Islam.

Now that the fires have been lit, this pot isn’t done boiling, yet.

Footnote:
(1) The same TV station reported as criticizing the proposed “Farewell Intercourse” law described in an earlier post.

(Crossposted at Public Secrets)

Comments are closed.